I am a Burmese exile taking a near-permanent refuge in New York and Sydney. Here are my essays about Burma and anything else I feel like writing about. And posting the articles I like from selected sites. Bridging Burma to the world this Blog is more of a Politically-Oriented Literary Blog than a Plain News Blog or a Sophisticated Thoughts Blog.

Thursday, November 10, 2016

Trump’s Victory: A Rebellion Against Silicon Valley

Donald Trump won a Republican White
House, Senate and House because he led a rebellion against the Democrats’
embrace of Silicon Valley’s business model, which profits from global trade,
offshore labor and foreign skilled workers.

Despite all the hoopla about supposedly booming American high-tech jobs,
globalization and the rise of China since the early 1990s have the cost the
United States about 5.8 million in U.S. manufacturing jobs, about one third of
the sector’s total workforce.

A huge portion of the jobs loss is due to giant Silicon Valley
technology corporations’ offshoring of the vast majority of their business
operations. As a result, the U.S. annual balance for advanced technology
products sales has fallen from a $35 billion surplus in 1992 to a $92 billion
deficit at the end in 2015.

As major government contractors,
Silicon Valley corporations for decades maintained a neutral stance on
political lobbying and campaign contributions. But TechCrunch blog nicknamed
Silicon Valley the “Valley of the Democrats,” after PayPal co-Founder and top
venture capitalist Peter Thiel reported in an interview last year that over 83
percent of political contributions by the area’s tech executives went solely to
Democrats.

The bipartisan Center for Responsive
Politics that tracks the influence of Silicon Valley money on American
elections and government bureaucrats commented, “Just as water flows downhill,
money in politics flows to where the power is.”
Their research found that with the rise of Democrat Barack Obama since
2008, Silicon Valley’s annual lobbying expenditures skyrocketed by 800 percent,
from $17.8 million to $139.5 million.

Silicon Valley’s “leaning liberal”
image has mirrored its effort to maximize profits by importing foreign
engineers and software coders under the U.S. Labor Department’s H-1B visa
program for foreigners with “distinguished merit and ability. The program was
designed to recruit people like Nobel Prize winners, but Silicon Valley has
been interested in cheap labor.

Breitbart News has written numerous
articles on how Hewlett-Packard, Southern California Edison, University of
California and dozens of Silicon Valley tech firms have replaced American
high-tech workers with H-1B foreigners. As the ultimate slap in the face, fired
U.S. workers are usually hired as temps to train their Indian and Chinese
replacements, who do the same job for two-thirds less pay.

Just before the election, Peter Thiel
said, “Silicon Valley has been incredibly successful over the last decade.” But
for America, “I think the truth has been more one of specific success, but more
general failure.” He said rich and powerful tech leaders had not focused
improving the national welfare outside of Silicon Valley.

Day two of the “Trump Bounce” sent the
stocks in the Dow Jones Industrial Index up almost 1.5 percent to an
all-time-high, led by U.S. banks and industrial stocks. But the big losers on
this historic day were Silicon Valley stocks, which were down by 1.5 percent.